At a workshop in the foothills of Mount Merapi, the week before our CO-OP cohort met in Jakarta in July 2024, a European art collector challenged my commendation of the Dutch Government’s return of the Singhosari stone Bhairava, Nandi, Ganesha and Brahma statues to Indonesia the year before. The Republic of Indonesia, he said, did not exist when these statues were brought legally to the colonial Netherlands in the 19th century, and so cannot be said to be their rightful owners. Better for them to stay in Europe, cared for by museums and private collectors like himself. Hadn’t I heard about the recent fire at the National Museum of Indonesia?
I don’t think I managed to formulate a coherent response to him at the time, but what came to mind later was that most of these tired objections to cultural heritage restitution efforts tend firstly, to fixate on the past — having recourse to juridical justifications from the colonial era — and secondly, to privilege the dormant object over communities of people who have suffered their absence for many years.
For our very first meeting as a cohort (in 2023), we read the 2018 report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, commissioned by President Macron of France, on the repatriation of sub-Saharan African cultural heritage from French museum collections. Sarr and Savoy addressed the temporalities of restitution head-on, arguing that we must acknowledge the temporal along with spatial estrangement. Objects forcibly removed from their original contexts of use leave a rift in the social fabric, their relations with people in their home communities severed. One cannot simply plug the gap with the belated return of these things. In many cases, the long absence of vital objects have so altered their home communities that it has caused an “amnesia” and an “erasure of memory” (Sarr and Savoy 2018, 31), the faculties which used to interface between people and now-lost objects atrophying from lack of use. They emphasise therefore that restitution in African countries is
a twofold task of the reconstruction of their memories and one of self-reinvention, through a resemanticisation and a resocialisation of the objects of their cultural heritage, through reconnecting these objects with the current societies and the questions and problems that these contemporary societies pose. It will be up to these new African communities to define their own vision of cultural heritage, the epistemological dispositives and the ecologies in which they would like to re-insert these objects… (Sarr and Savoy 2018, 32)
Similarly, restitution in the Southeast Asian context doesn’t end with objects landing on domestic shores, for both returning and receiving institutions. In this, my European collector-interlocutor was pointing in the right direction (though perhaps not the one he wanted to go in) — modern nation-states still have a responsibility to the communities whose cultures, ancestral territories, and indeed objects they have inherited. Hilmar Farid, at the time the Indonesian Director General of Culture, seemed fully aware of this, telling our CO-OP cohort when we met him that July that for him “the actual act of return is just a catalyst for generating conversations with the general public of Indonesia.” Exhibitions held this year in the national museums of Cambodia and Thailand showing objects returned from the United States is a natural first step in this process. Perhaps, however, it isn’t enough to show things only in the nations’ capitals. How do we go beyond this question of finding the “rightful owners” of heritage objects? We need to negotiate, for each case, along a continuum of identification where on one end there is the general — the Indonesian public, the Indonesian nation — and on the other the particular — the village, the family, the individual, which held possession of the object at a specific time. The transformation of origin communities over time complicates the space of geographic origin.
In thinking about this, I have found Walter Benjamin’s definition of the task of the materialist historian as being to grasp the “now of recognisability” (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit) of past things — in his case, nineteenth-century artworks — useful (Eiland and Jennings 2014, 876). One way to understand this is through Proust’s madeleine, that well-known catalyst of mémoire involontaire — upon tasting the tea-soaked crumbs of the madeleine in the present-day, Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time is provoked into a memory of eating that same cake from the spoon of his aunt Léonie, and following that the remainder of his childhood memories from his hometown of Combray. Note that Benjamin is interested in the perceiving subject as much as in the object perceived. An object from the past is “recognised” through a sensory experience of that object recreated “now”, evoking memories of an entire world long dormant. Heritage objects are, like Proust’s madeleine, key to such moments of recognition, evoking here not only the memories of individuals, but collective memories of communities. How many new nows of recognisability will be evoked by the Singhosari statues, along with the other objects, returned to Indonesia by the Dutch Government, where they may now be displayed in the National Museum in Jakarta which is reopening to the public next month? Many more, I would say, than if they remained pristine with their patinas in Europe.
With these thoughts during our visits to cultural sites around Yogyakarta and Solo as a cohort, I was primed to observe how the people around me “recognised” objects or built architecture from the past; how they perceived, interacted with, and performed in front of them. Was there a difference between the relational modes of locals and tourists, with the members of our cohort occupying various spots along that spectrum? And the question I asked myself as I turned the observational lens on myself as visitor — are there more “authentic” or “inauthentic” ways of engaging with the Javanese past? Marieke Bloembergen reminded us in one of our CO-OP discussion sessions on Mount Lawu that repatriated objects have been re-enlisted — along with the cultural sites they were taken from — into nationalist or regionalist narratives of greatness in Indonesia (see Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020). How did the individuals at the sites we observed identify with these narratives?
These contrasts came sharply into relief on the day we visited both the tomb of Islamic saint (wali) Sunan Tembayat, and the Hindu temple complex of Prambanan. In the first, our cohort followed a group of pilgrims from Sumatra through split gateways and narrow pathways enclosed by brick walls, until we came into a cavernous space resonating with prayers sung in call and response. When our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw that both men and women sat facing towards the centre, where there was a wood-panelled sanctum shrouded in pleats of white cloth. Even the children interrupted their play intermittently to recite scripture they had been taught along with their parents. The real object of worship within, the 17th-century tomb of the saint, was hidden from view.
At Prambanan later that day, I saw two men dressed all in white, with white Balinese udeng on their heads, break away from the swarm of people around Candi Siwa to sit on a mat, laying out offerings to pray along the outer wall. This immediately caught the attention of the tourists greatly outnumbering them, whipping out smartphones to snap pictures as they wandered by on the black sand. My notes from that day, written shortly after being told by one tourist that I was in the way of her shot, read:
“contrast with earlier site stark, engagement superficial and misdirected, tourist ego is foregrounded (‘get out of my photo’) vs (‘take a photo with me please’), scattered attention unlike the focused veneration of the hidden, the visible and the invisible”
In Luang Prabang, Lao PDR, where I am doing fieldwork for my doctoral project, I had a similar sensation when participating in a kathin, or robe-offering ceremony, at a Buddhist temple, after the end of the rainy season in November this year. I was one of those holding parasols to shade the donors from the sun as we circumambulated the ordination hall. Lining the edges of the procession were people standing and taking photographs. Some were dressed appropriately for the ceremony, in traditional Lao clothing, with phabiang cloth draped over their shoulders. Others were in shorts, with their shoulders bare, coming and going as they pleased. To avoid the local-tourist binary, perhaps one could say that the first group was participating in the ceremony (even when periodically occupied with their cameras), while the latter was only watching it. It felt much more uncomfortable for me to have my photograph taken while in procession by the watchers, than by other participants. This brought to mind how, developing on Foucault’s notion of sight as socially constructed, John Urry has written about the critique of photography as extension of the “tourist gaze”, such that “complex places are consumed as lightweight pre-arranged photo-scenes and experiencing is akin to seeing, seeing reduced to glancing and picture-making to clicking.” (Urry and Larsen 2011, 187)
As an outsider myself, and not only that but the most persistent of outsiders – a researcher – I am in no position to judge how others experience Indonesian or Lao heritage sites and objects. What would I consider an “authentic” mode of perception? Would such a mode recognise more authentically moments remembered from the past, or indeed the person remembering those moments? The Lao word khaorob ເຄົາລົບ, which I believe derives from the Pali gārava, meaning respect or reverence, is what comes to mind as a starting point. This, of course, is entirely subjective. But respect and reverence, although intangible, is usually performed in tangible, observable ways, and is one of the things which I believe must guide restitution efforts.
Near the end of our cohort’s stay in Yogyakarta, a few of us met with Efflina and Binarung of Komunitas Jangkah Nusantara, a youth-led organisation dedicated to preserving and digitising ancient manuscripts in their communities. As they are independently funded, Jangkah applies to grants like the British Library Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA), and Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WILMA). What struck me in our discussion was how the parameters set by foreign funders often fail to take local needs fully into account, particularly in terms of respect and reverence. Jangkah is always careful to ask permission not only from the immediate owners, but also from their ancestors, before digitising any manuscripts (see the tradisi wilujengan they do in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vADOe1fexQc). In one case, however, one foreign organisation was unwilling to pay for all the costs associated with the ritual visitations (ziarah, like with the tomb of Sunan Tembayat mentioned earlier) of the graves of the ancestors of the current owners of manuscripts, to ask for permission to digitise them. They had to cut down the number of tombs they could perform ziarah to from 15 to 5. Ultimately, it is people like Efflina and Binarung who define the “ecologies”, as Sarr and Savoy put it, into which they wish to harmonise objects and texts from the past, creating ways for people in their communities to recognise them anew.
References
Bloembergen, Marieke, and Martijn Eickhoff. 2020. ‘Introduction: Towards a Mobile History of Heritage in Asia’. In The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia: A Cultural History, 1st ed., 1–21. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614757.
Eiland, Howard, and Michael William Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Jamhari. ‘In the Center of Meaning: Ziarah Tradition in Java’. Studia Islamika 7, no. 1 (2000): 51–90.
Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. ‘The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics’.
Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 3rd ed. Theory, Culture & Society. Los Angeles ; London: SAGE.